Hold Everything Loosely

Today’s readings sound, on a first hearing, like a call to quit the world. Paul tells married men to live as though they had no wives and buyers to act as though they owned nothing. Jesus calls the poor blessed and pronounces a woe over the rich, the well fed, the cheerful, and the popular. Put the two side by side, and you could come away thinking the Gospel wants you miserable.

Read them again and something else surfaces. Neither Paul nor Jesus says a word against wives, food, laughter, or a good name. Both of them go after the grip. The form of this world is passing away, and the human heart keeps clutching it as if it were the last word. Paul calls that clutch being absorbed in the world, and Jesus means it when he says the rich have already received their consolation. You can be poor and clutch. You can be rich and hold loosely. The readings ask which one you’re doing right now.

Today the Church also remembers Saint Peter Claver, a Spaniard who sailed for Cartagena in 1610 knowing he would never see home again, and who signed his final vows “slave of the Africans forever.” He spent 40 years climbing down into the holds of slave ships. The city magistrates frowned at him for most of that time, and then buried him at public expense. He lived Paul’s “as though not” and every one of Luke’s beatitudes at once, in a port city that ran on human cargo. Keep him in view as you read.

The Readings

First Reading: 1 Corinthians 7:25-31

Now concerning the unmarried, I have no command of the Lord, but I give my opinion as one who by the Lord’s mercy is trustworthy. I think that in view of the impending distress it is well for a person to remain as he is. Are you bound to a wife? Do not seek to be free. Are you free from a wife? Do not seek marriage. But if you marry, you do not sin, and if a girl marries she does not sin. Yet those who marry will have worldly troubles, and I would spare you that. I mean, brethren, the appointed time has grown very short; from now on, let those who have wives live as though they had none, and those who mourn as though they were not mourning, and those who rejoice as though they were not rejoicing, and those who buy as though they had no goods, and those who deal with the world as though they had no dealings with it. For the form of this world is passing away.

Gospel: Luke 6:20-26

And he lifted up his eyes on his disciples, and said:

“Blessed are you poor, for yours is the kingdom of God.

“Blessed are you that hunger now, for you shall be satisfied.

“Blessed are you that weep now, for you shall laugh.

“Blessed are you when men hate you, and when they exclude you and revile you, and cast out your name as evil, on account of the Son of man! Rejoice in that day, and leap for joy, for behold, your reward is great in heaven; for so their fathers did to the prophets.

“But woe to you that are rich, for you have received your consolation.

“Woe to you that are full now, for you shall hunger.

“Woe to you that laugh now, for you shall mourn and weep.

“Woe to you, when all men speak well of you, for so their fathers did to the false prophets.”

Scriptural Analysis

Paul Gives An Opinion, And It Still Binds

“Concerning the unmarried” is literally “concerning virgins,” and the word covers men as well as women, since verse 27 turns at once to a man. Paul has no command of the Lord on this question, and he says so. That admission carries weight. Paul knows the difference between what Jesus said and what he himself thinks, which strongly argues against the old theory that the early Church invented most of Jesus’ sayings. What he offers instead is his “opinion,” and in Greek rhetoric that word (gnome) meant a maxim with real authority behind it, a rule of conduct from someone who had earned the right to give one. Paul’s credential is that the Lord’s mercy has made him trustworthy.^[1]

The maxim is short: it is good for a person to remain as he is. Paul gives it “in view of the impending distress.” Some take that as the ordinary hardship of life, marriage included; others as the tribulation of the last days. Since Paul goes straight on to say the time has been shortened, the second reading is stronger. He is looking at the end.^[2] Then the pair of questions. The word behind “do not seek to be free” (lysis) means the loosing of any bond, and several scholars think Paul has a betrothal in view: if you have promised a woman marriage, keep the promise. Either way, marrying is no sin. What the married will have is “tribulation of the flesh,” the cares that come with the state, and Paul, with an emphatic “I,” would like to spare you those.^[3]

The Time Has Been Compressed

Now Paul lifts his eyes from daily trials to the horizon. “The appointed time has grown very short.” The Greek verb means to compress or shrink, and Paul uses it nowhere else. The picture is of time squeezed by an outside force, and the force is the resurrection of Jesus, which entails his return (Acts 17:31; 1 Thessalonians 1:10). Paul never says how much time is left. His point is that believers see both ends of time at once, the way you see both ends of a closed accordion, and so they know what time is for in a way the unbelieving world cannot.^[4]

From that follows the string of five “as though not” clauses. Stoic moralists said similar things for the sake of inner sovereignty. Paul’s reason is the end of the age. He does not mean that married people should live celibately (he ruled that out in verse 5), or that mourners should stop weeping, or that buyers should stop owning. He means that none of these things lasts, and the danger is being absorbed by them at the cost of the one thing that does, which is your standing in Christ. George Montague, in the Catholic Commentary on Sacred Scripture, boils it down to one line: “Hold everything you have with a relaxed grasp!”^[5]

The last clause carries a pun the English cannot show. Those who “use” the world (chromenoi) should not “use it up” (katachromenoi), the way a greedy child devours a plate of sweets and reaches for more. Christians hold their goods lightly because they are waiting for their returning Lord. And the reason: “the form of this world is passing away.” The word for “form” (schema) often means appearance rather than reality, and Euripides used it for the theater, where the scene changes fast. To commit fully to a stage set is to live in a dream. The world is temporary, which the psalmist already knew when he asked to be taught to count his days (Psalm 90:12). The difference is that the Christian counts them with joy.^[6]

The Church reads these verses as the charter of consecrated life, and John Paul II quoted this very verse to explain why consecrated persons are a sign of the world to come.^[7] But Paul’s preference is for the state, and the state only. Saint Augustine wrote that he did not hesitate to prefer the humble wife to the proud virgin, and Saint Thomas Aquinas gives the reason: what makes virginity a virtue is the freedom it gives to occupy oneself with the things of God. A proud virgin has thrown that freedom away. Montague’s old theology professor put the two vocations in one line: “Celibacy safeguards the freedom of marriage.” The celibate proves, by living it, that marriage is a gift freely chosen and that God’s love can fill a human heart.^[8]

Blessed Are You Poor

Luke’s sermon comes right after Jesus prays all night and chooses the Twelve (Luke 6:12-16). He comes down to “a level place” with a crowd from all Judea and from pagan Tyre and Sidon, heals them all, and then lifts his eyes on his disciples. Ambrose reads that gesture as the disclosure of a hidden light; Bede notes that while Jesus speaks to everyone, he fixes his gaze on those who will receive the word with an attentive heart.^[9]

Matthew’s Sermon on the Mount has eight or nine beatitudes in the third person. Luke has four, in the second person, each with a matching woe. The “happy is the man who” form runs through the psalms (Psalm 1:1), and the “woe” is the cry of the prophets (Isaiah 5:8-22). The reversals are stated in the passive, “you shall be satisfied,” which in Jewish speech means God himself will do it.^[10]

Luke’s poor are the economically poor, and in his Gospel they stand for everyone on the margins of God’s people (Luke 4:18; 7:22; 14:13). Yet the Fathers were careful here. Basil says that not everyone crushed by poverty is blessed, only the one who has preferred the command of Christ to worldly riches, because “nothing involuntary deserves a blessing.” Ambrose puts poverty first among the beatitudes because it is the purest of the virtues: the man who has despised the world will reap an eternal reward. So Jesus’ first words to his newly chosen apostles reverse what counts as happiness. The kingdom “is yours,” present tense, and it belongs first to the men who have just left everything to follow him (Luke 5:11, 28).^[11]

The next two beatitudes describe the same poor. They hunger now and weep now, and Luke’s “now” points at the present. God will fill them, as Mary sang in the Magnificat (Luke 1:53) and as Jesus will show in sign when he feeds five thousand until all are “satisfied” (Luke 9:17). They will laugh, and the verb appears nowhere else in the New Testament. Chrysostom draws the lesson: godly sorrow works repentance to salvation, and “we often find the Lord sorrowing, never laughing.” The laughter promised here is the joy of the kingdom, and it comes after.^[12]

The fourth beatitude is for the day “when men hate you, and when they exclude you and revile you, and cast out your name as evil.” Luke’s three verbs move from attitude to action to speech, and the word for “exclude” means to set apart, which is to say the disciples will be pushed out of the synagogue. The “name” is probably the name Christian itself (Acts 11:26). Bede reads it that way: let them erase the name of the Crucified, for Christ raises those who have died with him. The command that follows is “leap for joy,” and Luke’s verb is the one he used for John the Baptist leaping in Elizabeth’s womb (Luke 1:41, 44). The prophets were treated this way, and Stephen will say so to the Sanhedrin (Acts 7:52) and then die like one.^[13]

Woe To You That Are Rich

Only Luke records the woes, and they match the beatitudes line for line. The rich “have received your consolation.” The word (paraklesis) means something you lean on, and the consolation of the rich is their wealth. Simeon had waited for “the consolation of Israel” (Luke 2:25); the rich man in the parable is told he received his good things in his lifetime (Luke 16:25). A certain shortsightedness comes with security, and it leads a person to think there is nothing more to have.^[14]

Ambrose, who had governed a Roman province and knew wealthy men, refuses to condemn wealth as such. Riches carry many temptations to crime and many incitements to virtue, he says, and what the Lord condemns is the man who does not know how to use them, who hides for himself what was given him for the common good. Ambrose locates the fault in the heart of the possessor. The money is innocent. Bede points to the rich man in purple who feasted every day and then begged a drop of water from the finger of Lazarus (Luke 16:19-24). On the last woe, the woe over popularity, Bede says flattery is the nurse of sin, like oil poured on flames, and the false prophets of Israel were popular because they told the people what they wanted to hear (Jeremiah 6:14).^[15]

Why does Matthew give only blessings while Luke adds woes? Bede answers that untaught hearers must first be brought to good works by fear, while the perfect need only be invited by rewards.^[16] Saint Thomas answers a different objection, that these rewards are all in the future, by saying that they begin in this life in hope and are perfected in the next. The Catechism teaches that the beatitudes reveal the goal of human existence, and it warns the rich who find their consolation in abundance of goods. Pope Benedict XVI singled out Francis of Assisi as the most intensely lived illustration of the first beatitude and drew a rule of interpretation from him: “The saints are the true interpreters of Holy Scripture.” A text becomes clearest in the people who have been gripped by it and lived it out.^[17]

Daily Application

Both readings ask you one question. What are you gripping?

Take Paul first, because his word is easier to misread. He does not ask you to love your wife less, grieve less, or enjoy less. He asks you to hold all of it knowing that it is passing and you are not. The married man who lives “as though” he had no wife is the man who loves her without making her his salvation. The mourner who weeps “as though not” mourning is the one whose grief has a floor under it, because the resurrection is behind us and the Lord is ahead of us. That is interior liberty. It is the difference between a hand that holds and a hand that clutches, and you learn which one you have by how you react when God moves something.

Now take Jesus, and be honest about which side of the sermon you are standing on. Most of us reading this have received our consolation. We are full, we laugh, and we would like people to speak well of us. Ambrose lets you off the hook on the money and puts you right back on it with the heart. What did you receive that was meant for the common good, and where is it? Whose flattery are you drinking, and whose hard truth are you avoiding because it would cost you a good name? Luke’s fourth woe is the one that catches serious Catholics, because it is possible to keep every commandment and still arrange your life so that nobody ever hates you on account of the Son of Man.

Saint Peter Claver arranged his life the other way. Slavery ran so deep in the first-century economy that scholars estimate a third of the people in the big cities were slaves, and the Catholic Commentary on Sacred Scripture pauses at this very chapter of 1 Corinthians to state what the Church now teaches without qualification: to buy, sell, and exchange human beings like merchandise is a sin against the dignity of persons (Catechism 2414).^[18] Cartagena in 1615 ran on exactly that trade. Ten thousand Africans a year came through the port, and a third of them died on the crossing. Claver could not end the trade. What he could do was go down into the hold with medicine, bread, lemons, and interpreters, and tell people who had been handled as cargo that God himself had given them a dignity no one could sell. He baptized an estimated 300,000 of them over 40 years. When he traveled, he slept in the slave quarters and turned down the planters’ hospitality. The magistrates resented him for most of his life. Then he spent 4 years sick and largely neglected, died on September 8, 1654, and the same magistrates buried him with public honors. Hated, excluded, reviled, and at the very end spoken well of. He had leaped for joy long before.

So here is the interior movement the readings ask of you today, and it has to come before any practice will stick. Loosen the grip. Name the one thing you are holding as if it were the last word, whether a person, a plan, a bank balance, or a reputation, and tell God out loud that it is passing and he is not. Then count your days (Psalm 90:12). A man who counts his days does not devour the world like a child with sweets. He uses it, gratefully, and moves on.

After that, find the hold of the ship. Every town has one: the place where people are treated as a means and nobody with standing goes. Take something there this week that costs you, whether money you had earmarked for yourself, an evening, or your name on a letter that will make the wrong people frown. Peter Claver’s whole sanctity fits inside Luke’s four beatitudes and Paul’s five “as though nots,” and none of it required him to be miserable. It required him to hold his life loosely enough that God could spend it. Hold yours the same way, starting today.

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Notes

1. George T. Montague, First Corinthians, Catholic Commentary on Sacred Scripture (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2011), 129–30; Raymond F. Collins, First Corinthians, Sacra Pagina 7 (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1999), 289–90, 293. ↩
2. Montague, First Corinthians, 130; Collins, First Corinthians, 293. ↩
3. Montague, First Corinthians, 130–31; Collins, First Corinthians, 294. ↩
4. Montague, First Corinthians, 131; Collins, First Corinthians, 295. ↩
5. Montague, First Corinthians, 131; Collins, First Corinthians, 291. ↩
6. Montague, First Corinthians, 132; Collins, First Corinthians, 295. ↩
7. John Paul II, Vita Consecrata (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1996), no. 26, quoted in Montague, First Corinthians, 133. ↩
8. Augustine, On the Good of Marriage 8, and Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae II-II, q. 152, a. 5, both cited in Montague, First Corinthians, 133–34; Montague, First Corinthians, 135. ↩
9. Pablo T. Gadenz, The Gospel of Luke, Catholic Commentary on Sacred Scripture (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2018), 129; Thomas Aquinas, Catena Aurea: Commentary on the Four Gospels, Collected out of the Works of the Fathers, vol. 3, St. Luke (Oxford: John Henry Parker, 1843), on Luke 6:20–23, citing Ambrose and Bede. ↩
10. Luke Timothy Johnson, The Gospel of Luke, Sacra Pagina 3 (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1991), 106, 108, 110–11; Joseph A. Fitzmyer, The Gospel According to Luke I–IX, Anchor Bible 28 (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1981), 632–33, 636. ↩
11. Johnson, Gospel of Luke, 106; Gadenz, Gospel of Luke, 129–30; Aquinas, Catena Aurea, vol. 3, on Luke 6:20–23 (Basil and Ambrose). ↩
12. Gadenz, Gospel of Luke, 131; Johnson, Gospel of Luke, 106–7; Fitzmyer, Gospel According to Luke I–IX, 634; Aquinas, Catena Aurea, vol. 3, on Luke 6:20–23 (Chrysostom). ↩
13. Johnson, Gospel of Luke, 107; Fitzmyer, Gospel According to Luke I–IX, 635; Gadenz, Gospel of Luke, 131; Aquinas, Catena Aurea, vol. 3, on Luke 6:20–23 (Bede). ↩
14. Johnson, Gospel of Luke, 108; Fitzmyer, Gospel According to Luke I–IX, 636. ↩
15. Aquinas, Catena Aurea, vol. 3, on Luke 6:24–26 (Ambrose and Bede); Johnson, Gospel of Luke, 108. ↩
16. Aquinas, Catena Aurea, vol. 3, on Luke 6:24–26 (Bede). ↩
17. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 69, a. 2–3; Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2nd ed. (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1997), nos. 1716–29, 2546–47; Benedict XVI, Jesus of Nazareth: From the Baptism in the Jordan to the Transfiguration, trans. Adrian J. Walker (New York: Doubleday, 2007), 78–79, quoted in Gadenz, Gospel of Luke, 130, 132. ↩
18. Montague, First Corinthians, 128–29; Catechism of the Catholic Church, no. 2414. ↩

Books Cited

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• George T. Montague, SM, First Corinthians, Catholic Commentary on Sacred Scripture (Baker Academic, 2011)
• Raymond F. Collins, First Corinthians, Sacra Pagina 7 (Liturgical Press)
• Pablo T. Gadenz, The Gospel of Luke, Catholic Commentary on Sacred Scripture (Baker Academic, 2018)
• St. Thomas Aquinas, Catena Aurea: Commentary on the Four Gospels, 4-volume set (Baronius Press)
• Luke Timothy Johnson, The Gospel of Luke, Sacra Pagina 3 (Liturgical Press)
• Joseph A. Fitzmyer, SJ, The Gospel According to Luke I-IX, Anchor Bible 28 (Doubleday, 1981)
• Catholic Church, Catechism of the Catholic Church, Second Edition (Doubleday / Image, 2003)